Streisand: Her Life (15 page)

O
N A HOT
Monday morning a few weeks later Barbara, skeptical and scared, walked into the Lion, the dark, slightly seedy neighborhood watering hole on the ground floor of a brownstone at 62 West Ninth Street. Hopefuls for the talent show had to audition for the club’s manager, Burke McHugh, on the morning of the contest, and the best four were invited back for the competition. McHugh was used to dealing with some very questionable characters at these cattle calls, and when he saw Barbara he muttered to his pianist, “Oh, boy, here comes a winner.”

With her hair unwashed and uncombed, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, she looked, McHugh told the author Randall Reiss in 1992, like “a kid off the street who hadn’t been home to change her clothes.” He asked her if she had come to audition. Self-protectively, she feigned ignorance. “Audition for what?” McHugh explained about the talent contest, and Barbara said, “Well, I’ve never sung in public before, but I’ll give it a try.”

She told him her name was Barbara Strinberg, and then she sang the haunting Harold Arlen-Truman Capote ballad “A Sleepin’ Bee” for him. McHugh and his piano player, a young man named Patty, felt goose bumps rise on their arms. When she finished, McHugh exclaimed, “Oh, my God, Barbara, that was really magnificent!” He told her to come back for the contest and asked how to spell Strinberg.

Now that she had been accepted, there was no reason to hide her identity, but she didn’t want to admit she’d lied. “I’ve gotta change the name. I can’t stand it.... It sounds too Jewish.” According to McHugh, at that moment “Footsteps in the Sand” blared from a radio in the next room. “Sand,” Barbara said. “I like that, that’s a good last syllable. I’ll call myself Barbara Streisand.”

When she came back at eight that evening, Barbara looked around the dark, smoky room and wondered, Where are all the women? Barry had neglected to tell her that the Lion was a predominantly gay bar. With her liberal leanings, Barbara had no problem with homosexuals; she had first encountered gay men during her summer at Malden Bridge and in her acting classes. But she had never seen them behave so openly before, and she watched them with fascination as she waited for the contest to begin.

They were arguably the toughest audience Barbara could have faced. Like Barry Dennen, most of them were immersed in show business history. They adored Judy Garland and Ethel Merman; they would trek miles to catch a performance by Mabel Mercer or Julie Wilson or Hildegarde; they bought the original cast album of every Broadway musical. For a young girl singer to excite these men, she’d have to be awfully good.

The Lion’s talent night was popular for contradictory reasons. On the one hand, one never knew when a truly funny comic or a really fine singer would step up to the mike and make the evening special. On the other, there was always the delicious chance that some poor deluded soul would rock the room with unintended hilarity through sheer ineptitude. Burke McHugh preferred to have several different styles of singer and a comedian on the bil
l
, and this night was no exception. Barbara’s competitors were a comedian, a light opera singer, and Dawn Hampton, the niece of Lionel Hampton, a “jazz belter” who “sang like there was no tomorrow,” McHugh recalled.

Last on the bill, Barbara stepped timorously onto the parquet “stage” next to Patty’s piano, the lusty applause for Dawn Hampton ringing in her ears. She took what looked like a briefcase from under her arm, put it on top of the piano, opened it, pulled out her sheet music, and gave it to Patty. “Tonight,” she said softly, “I am going to sing ‘A Sleepin’ Bee.
’”

If she heard the titters, she didn’t let on. By now most of the audience suspected McHugh was having fun again. They looked at this gawky, skinny girl with her distractingly large nose and crooked teeth and eyes that seemed to watch each other, and they didn’t know whether to laugh or groan. Her getup hardly helped. On top of her head she had bobby-pinned a Dynel hairpiece that looked, in the words of a friend, “like a cheese Danish.” From under it her real hair fell stringily to her shoulders. She wore a short purple sheath and a jacket festooned with purple ostrich feathers, which the thrift shop clerk told her had once belonged to a countess. With feathers wisping around her shoulders and the audience ready to pounce, Barbara stood stock still under the spotlight, closed her eyes, and dramatically drew back her head as Patty tinkled out her introduction. Someone in the audience muttered “Oh, boy.”

Then this eccentric, clearly misguided creature, her head still back, her eyes still closed, opened her mouth and sang “A Sleepin’ Bee,” and the voice that emerged from her grabbed the men’s breath away. The titters and the talking stopped. She began that languid ballad of young love softly, her voice youthful but clear as a bell, her high notes enthrallingly pure. Then she gathered steam, took on more force as her voice built to “Broadway belter” proportions. Finally she began a breathtaking swoop up the scale, leaping a full octave in one word, “love,” and her first song in front of a paying audience came to an end.

For a few moments the seventy or so men sat in stunned silence. Then they burst into wild applause and cheers, shouting “More! More!” as Barbara laughed nervously and looked around the room. She glanced at Burke McHugh and mouthed, “Should I do another one?” He nodded, and she went back to her briefcase for another chart, pulling out “When Sunny Gets Blue.” Again the voice was mesmerizing, and again that was only part of the magic spell she wove. She didn’t sing these songs in the la-di-da style of so many pop vocalists, she seemed to have
lived
them, seemed to be making up the lyrics on the spot from her own experience. This jaded audience knew immediately that they had just seen someone very special, a girl with a beautiful voice who could bring drama and shading and vibrancy to a lyric. The “applause meter” gave Barbara the contest by a wide margin, and Burke McHugh told her to come back on Saturday night.

She and Barry ran over to the Pam Pam coffee shop on Sixth Avenue, Barbara floating on air, suffused with the approval she had just won. Barry let her fly awhile, then began to criticize her performance, pointing out areas where she could have given more or where she should have pulled back. “Yeah, yeah,” Barbara replied, her eyes narrowing. “You’re right, you’re right.”

Saturday night, on a bill with three other performers, she sang the same two songs plus “Lullaby of Birdland” and again wowed the audience, many of whom had come expressly to see her after hearing the buzz about her Monday night performance. The following Monday she defended her title, adding “Why Try to Change Me Now?” and “Long Ago and Far Away” to her brief set. The gay comedian Michael Greer, who then called himself Mal James, was one of the contestants that night. The falsetto singer Tiny Tim was another.

“I had already heard rumblings about this strange girl with a lot of talent,” Greer recalled, “so I knew she’d be tough competition. She looked like she had dressed herself from a garage sale. As I remember she wore a tiny high-heeled shoe in her hair because she liked the rhinestones in it. She sang something totally off-the-wall like ‘Happy Birthday’ and it was a mind blower. When I heard her sing I thought, My God, who is she? The voice was so beautiful it captivated everyone there.”

Barbara won again—Greer came in second—and on the following three Mondays as well. By now word of “this strange, incredible girl” had spread throughout New York’s hippest audiences, and lines of people trailed down Ninth Street to Sixth Avenue on Monday and Saturday nights. During the second week Barbara told Burke McHugh she wanted three pictures of herself, not just one, on the signboard outside the club. And she wanted to change the spelling of her name. “Back to Strinberg?” McHugh asked.

“
No,” Barbara replied. “I wanna take an
a
out of ‘Barbara.’ Who needs it? The name’s pronounced Bar-bra. So that’s how I want you to spell it: B-a-r-b-r-a.”

Boy, this one really is a nut, McHugh thought. But he did as he was asked, and Barbra Streisand was born. It was her answer to all those agents who had advised her to change her name to Barbara Sands because Streisand was too ethnic or too hard to pronounce. This way, she had changed her name and she hadn’t. What she
had
done was become, among all the thousands and thousands of Barbaras in the world, the one and only Barbra.

A
FTER A MONTH
of weekends and Mondays at the Lion, Barbra was forced to retire from the competition as an undefeated champion when Burke McHugh and his partner, Ernie Sgroi Jr., told her they wanted to give somebody else a chance. Without the fifty dollars a week and free meals she had grown used to, Barbra faced dire financial straits again, and she asked McHugh if there was something else she could do at the club. He said he needed a replacement coat-check girl for a couple of weeks, but she wouldn’t want to do that, would she? “Sure I would,” she replied. “Why not?”

Every night she arrived at the club at eight o’clock, sloppily dressed, went into the coat room, closed the door, and reopened it a few moments later wearing a flashy cocktail dress. After a week of this, one of the regulars, a costume designer who called himself Peaches, noticed that she never cleaned the dress. “Hey, Barbra,” he teased her, “don’t you think you should send that dress to the dry cleaners? It’s gonna start to walk on its own pretty soon.” As he and his friends giggled, Barbra snapped back, “Go ahead and laugh. When I’m a big star on Broadway, you’ll still be just a bunch of drunken cackling hens!”

Broadway was pretty far off, but another nightclub engagement was not. Ernie Sgroi told Barbra that his father owned the nearby Bon Soir, a larger, classier, more mainstream joint on Eighth Street, and he had persuaded Ernie Senior to let her audition for his club. An engagement at the Bon Soir meant more money than she’d been paid at the Lion, more prestige, and a more influential audience.

It also meant that Barbra would have to come up with some new material, and quickly. She worked excitedly with Barry over the next few weeks, sitting on the floor of his living room listening to dozens of hours of tapes of the great singers who had gone before her. Dennen hammered home his idea that Barbra should approach each lyric as an acting exercise. “I would work with her phrase by phrase,” he said, “trying this, trying that, shaping gestures, timing, the kind of effect Barbra and I wanted.” He played only the musical creme de la creme for her, zeroing in on songs that best showcased her voice.

Barbra had never learned to read music, just as she had never taken a singing lesson. But she needed to listen to a song only once or twice to master it. She would hear a stylized vocal, imitate it, then give it her own special twist and make it her own. Barry knew he was in the presence of one of that mysterious, singular breed—a musical natural.

Perhaps Barry Dennen’s greatest contribution to Barbra Streisand’s musical vocabulary was his concept of reviving “unusual, forgotten, or outrageous” material rather than regurgitating the old chestnuts that were a staple of every nightclub act. Barbra was all for it. “The Bon Soir was a sophisticated little nightclub,” she said. “That annoys me, anything that’s supposed to be posh and sophisticated, you know. So I wanted to do something that was completely wrong.” Barbra told Barry she’d like to do “a nursery rhyme or something,” and he suggested she sing the unlikely “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?” in order to surprise, delight—maybe even shock?—the blase New York audiences. Barbara soaked up this sensibility, one that would serve her well as her career took off.

Barbra needed new clothes for her Bon Soir act, too, so she asked Terry Leong, a friend of Marilyn Fried’s who had designed for Seventh Avenue’s garment district, to help her put together some outfits. He and Barbra scoured the thrift shops, picking up a pure silk beaded vest for five dollars, a pair of shoes for three dollars, or a hat for two dollars. Barbra would spend hours rummaging around in a dusty Ninth Avenue thrift shop to find the perfect dress to go with a vest she’d discovered on Second Avenue, then traipse back to Third Avenue on a quest for the right bag.